Ok comrades, we have quite a bit done, we are well into our stride. Look at those fat juicy progress bars: while there is still a long way to go, remember how recently they were just a flimsy few pixels. Last week we left behind Dickensian factories and looked at the liminal space between master crasftsmen’s workshops and the drone-work on assembly lines. Now we are going to get into more detail on how that change happens, and how factory-work takes hold of society.

Don’t forget that this is a club: it is a shared activity. We engage with Karl Marx, and we also engage with each other in the comments and build camaraderie.

The overall plan is to read Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included in this particular reading club, but comrades are encouraged to do other solo and collaborative reading.) This bookclub will repeat yearly. The three volumes in a year works out to about 6½ pages a day for a year, 46⅔ pages a week.

I’ll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested. Let me know if you want to be added or removed.

Just joining us? It’ll take you about 15-16 hours to catch up to where the group is. Use the archives below to help you.

Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7

Week 8, Feb 19-25, we are reading from Volume 1: what remains of Chapter 14 (i.e. sections 3,4 and 5), plus section 1 of Chapter 15

In other words, aim to reach the heading ‘The Value Transferred by Machinery to the Product’ by Sunday

Discuss the week’s reading in the comments.

Use any translation/edition you like. Marxists.org has the Moore and Aveling translation in various file formats including epub and PDF: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/

Ben Fowkes translation, PDF: http://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=9C4A100BD61BB2DB9BE26773E4DBC5D

AernaLingus says: I noticed that the linked copy of the Fowkes translation doesn’t have bookmarks, so I took the liberty of adding them myself. You can either download my version with the bookmarks added, or if you’re a bit paranoid (can’t blame ya) and don’t mind some light command line work you can use the same simple script that I did with my formatted plaintext bookmarks to take the PDF from libgen and add the bookmarks yourself.

Audiobook of Ben Fowkes translation, American accent, male, links are to alternative invidious instances: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9

Resources

(These are not expected reading, these are here to help you if you so choose)

  • ComradeRat [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    6·
    9 months ago

    Yes, but Marx feels much more ambivalent on manufacture and division of labour and factories general than this.

    Marx is not saying “factory organisation good” here; he is saying “the bourgeois admit factory organization is shit when it applies to them but pretend its great when it applies to the workers.”

    Socialism will ofc have to seize onto existing(machine) manufacture just as capitalism originally seized onto handicraft, but eventually socialism will need to move beyond this factory-like division of labour and it is hence not something to be idealised or uncritically praised.

    This is not a passage where Marx is outlining what crude communism will look like; this is a passage where he is calling out bourgeoisie ideologue hypocrisy.

    • Vampire [any]@hexbear.netOPMEnglish
      5·
      9 months ago

      Marx is not saying “factory organisation good” here;

      I said above “Marx has praised the division of labour as increasing productivity (especially in Ch.14 Section 2).” Here’s some thing he said:

      • “it is firstly clear that a worker who performs the same simple operation for the whole of his life converts his body into the automatic, one-sided implement of that operation. Consequently, he takes less time in doing it than the craftsman who performs a whole series of operations in succession… Hence, in comparison with the independent handicraft, more is produced in less time, or in other words the productivity of labour is increased.”

      • “Manufacture, in fact, produces the skill of the specialized worker by reproducing and systematically driving to an extreme within the workshop the naturally developed differentiation which it found ready to hand in society.”

      • “A craftsman who performs the various partial operations in the production of a finished article one after the other must at one time change his place, at another time his tools. The transition from one operation to another interrupts the flow of his labour and creates gaps in his working day, so to speak. These close up when be is tied to the same operation the whole day long; they vanish in the same proportion as the changes in his work diminish.”

      Section 3:

      • “In comparison with a handicraft, productive power is gained, and this gain arises from the general co-operative character of manufacture.”
      • ComradeRat [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        6·
        9 months ago

        Marx isn’t praising productivity, especially not in the manufacture-division-of-labour.

        Sections two and three describe manufacture, and sections four and five are harshly critical or condemnatory of it both in itself and as it exists under capitalism. This critique begins in section three, towards the end, when Marx talks about unskilled labour and the separation of activities which are rich in content from those which are tedious.

        Section four has quotes like e.g.

        This is not the place, however, for us to show how division of labour seizes upon, not only the economic, but every other sphere of society, and everywhere lays the foundation for that specialization, that development in a man of one single faculty at the expense of all others, which already caused Adam Ferguson, the master of Adam Smith, to exclaim: ‘We make a nation of Helots, and have no free citizens’.

        Where Marx 1. quotes a bougie economist for extra authority on the division of labour sucking and 2. says that this (i.e. Capital) is not the place to discuss this in general. (For such discussion, see e.g. Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law).

        Section 5 is even more openly condemnatory e.g.

        [Manufacture] converts the worker into a crippled monstrousity by furthering his particular skill in a forcing-house, through the suppression of a whole world of productive drives and inclinations, just as in the states of La Plata they butcher a whole beast for the sake of his hide or his tallow

        P486-88 (Penguin Fowkes translation) also shows how, while the political economists view the social division of labour “as a means of producing more commodities with a given quanitity of labour, and consequently of cheapening commodities and accelerating the accumulation of capital”. He contrasts this view with that of the few modern economists who don’t fetishise exchange value, profit, etc, (as well as the ancients) where 1. division of labour allows people to do stuff they like and are good at and 2. without at least some division of labour nothing can be done.

        I said above “Marx has praised the division of labour as increasing productivity (especially in Ch.14 Section 2).”

        You also said:

        This is an important passage for understanding what Marxism would look like. Here Marx talks about the planned economy.

        Capitalists do accept the ‘planned economy’, so long as it’s within the walls of a factory. … So Marx wants to bring that increased productivity to the economy as a whole by bringing the same sort of rational planning into the economy as there is in the factory.

        Which is the part i disagreed with